SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR

Simone de Beauvoir was born in Paris on January 9, 1908. An avowed atheist but a cultural conservative, de Beauvoir’s father was an upwardly mobile individual who harbored aspirations as an actor, dabbled in the theater, studied law, but ultimately went to work as a legal secretary in the civil service. De Beauvoir’s mother was from an aristocratic, staunchly Catholic family, and despite her husband’s hostility to religion, she struggled to raise her daughter in the Catholic faith. She succeeded for a time, but at the age of fourteen de Beauvoir had a deconversion experience that left her cold to faith for the rest of her life.

A brilliant student, de Beauvoir began studying philosophy in her high school years. In 1925, she passed her baccalaureate exam in math and philosophy, and soon thereafter she started her studies at the Sorbonne. De Beauvoir wrote a thesis on Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, and at the young age of twenty-one, she took second place to her class-mate Jean-Paul Sartre in the highly competitive aggregate exam in philosophy. In the process of cramming for that exam together, de Beauvoir and Sartre became lifelong friends and lovers. For the time, their relationship was highly unconventional.

Sartre and de Beauvoir were candid about the fact that they would never marry, and they made it known that they were involved in an open relationship; open, that is, to the possibility of love and love affairs with others. De Beauvoir had dalliances with both men and women, and she and Sartre entered into triangular relationships with other women. In 1943, with Sartre’s approval, de Beauvoir published a fictionalized account of the love triangle among Sartre, Olga Kosakievicz, and herself. The book, She Came to Stay, sold very well and launched de Beauvoir on the writing career that she had always aspired to. It was followed by a string of novels and plays.

During the German occupation, the Nazis had de Beauvoir dismissed from her lycée teaching post; nevertheless, she was not a particularly active member of the Resistance. After the war, de Beauvoir wrote articles for and helped edit the prestigious Les Temps Modernes, a French literary and political review. In 1949, she published her most influential book, The Second Sex. In this work that was, at the time, highly controversial, de Beauvoir argues that men have succeeded in defining themselves as the norm (consider, for example, the use of the masculine pronoun to refer to an unspecified individual) and in the process women are automatically regarded as “the other.” In this proto-feminist treatise, de Beauvoir takes the Sartrean position, to be tempered in later years, that women are largely responsible for accepting the chauvinist structure of society. Not surprisingly, the heroines in many of de Beauvoir’s novels were women who, like herself, refused to abide by social conventions.

Ironically enough, however, de Beauvoir often referred to herself as Sartre’s disciple. And the reader will be able to detect Sartre’s presence in our selection from de Beauvoir’s Ethics of Ambiguity (1947). It is as if de Beauvoir is here trying to provide the promised (but never delivered) sequel on ethics to Sartre’s Being and Nothingness.

For Sartre, there is no God, no divine plan, no universal moral law, and the French philosopher has often been condemned for the fact that his radical view of human freedom shipwrecks normative ethics. Given Sartre’s position, what rational grounds are there for claiming that one action is better than another? De Beauvoir tries to resolve this question for Sartre. While acknowledging that “ethics does not provide recipes” and that we are condemned to ambiguity, de Beauvoir argues, in an almost Kantian fashion, that moral worth resides in the way that we relate ourselves to our own freedom and to the freedom of others. The analysis of freedom is the axial point of de Beauvoir’s authorship, and she works this theme out very well in her piquant collection of short stories The Woman Destroyed.

After Sartre’s death in 1980, de Beauvoir published Adieu: A Farewell to Sartre. Shortly before she died in 1986, de Beauvoir also published an intriguing collection of letters from her lifelong companion.